The Big Smoke

‘London has long enjoyed a reputation for good beer,’ opines ‘The London Encyclopedia’ before going on to list some of the great London breweries – Courage, Lion (the lion statue on the south side of Westminster Bridge Road used to be part of its front), Whitbread, Young’s and Park Royal, where Guinness was brewed. These days, London’s contribution to beer-making is paltry. Young’s closed in 2006, leaving Fuller’s in Chiswick as the only major brewery operating in the capital.

Stepping up to the plate are a handful of microbreweries. Twickenham Fine Ales have been going since 2004; Greenwich’s Meantime since 2000. New kid on the block is Sambrook’s, which started in 2008 on Young’s old patch of Wandsworth. Twickenham Fine Ales

I went on a tour of Sambrook’s last week as part of a beer-tasting package offered by My Brewery Tap, a website that specialises in selling ale made by small breweries all over the country (and from where my Christmas present this year will be coming, if hints later at home were correctly interpreted).

We met at Sambrook’s cute front bar, which is open during office hours and has both of Sambrook’s beers on tap – Wandle, a tasty session ale; and the slightly heavier Junction. Pulling the pints was founder and owner Duncan Sambrook.

Duncan was an accountant who had an epiphany in the unlikely environs of the Great British Beer Festival. Here he was, he thought, in the middle of London surrounded by all this lovely beer, and none of it was brewed in London. So Duncan decided to do something about it.

Duncan takes our group (you need to book as a party of ten) behind the scenes, and talks us through the beer-making process. It is very complicated, with so many different stages that I’m amazed that the stuff ever got invented at all. I mean, who worked out that if you got some barley, soaked it to the point of germination, and then constantly rotated it on a flat floor with a large rake so the seeds didn’t know up from down and couldn’t break into shoot, you could roast the resulting malted barley, boil it, add hops, cool it, add yeast, add a fish’s bladder, call it beer, drink it and not kill yourself?

At the end of the tour, I raised my Wandle to salute such dedication.

As well as plying us with beer, Duncan also encouraged us to sample the key ingredients – we nibbled the three different types of malted barley that give his ale its flavour, and sniffed the hops, which smell a lot like marijuana.

At this point, we could kid ourselves we hadn’t just gone out drinking for the night, we were actually learning stuff (the reason for the popularity of pub quizzes, surely?). But it wasn’t long before the educative edifice crumbled.

We waved farewell to Duncan and left Sambrook’s, slipping through Battersea backstreets until we reached the Westbridge. You can be pretty sure you’re going to like a pub when you walk in and the jukebox is playing ‘Folsom Prison Blues’. And you can be absolutely certain you’re going to like it, when you walk into the upstairs function room, and 13 different real ales are lined up waiting to be sampled, there’s a buffet that features mini-hamburgers and fish and chips, and the waiter assures you that a cheese plate will soon be on its way.

Even though we were only drinking a third of a pint at a time, things from here get hazy. I remember only that the final ale was called Death Or Glory, that tartare sauce leaves one hell of a stain, and that I'd recommend the experience to anybody interested in beer and longing for the taste of London ale.

To book a tour and tasting session, see My Brewery Tap. To attend January's open day at Sambrook's, see their website.